The SNP is nasty, weak and utterly self-interested
Nicola Sturgeon earned the admiration of her American audience earlier this year as she pledged support from a future independent Scotland for Nato. “We are clearer than ever,” she gushed “that membership of Nato would not only be vital to Scotland’s security – though it most definitely would be – it would also be the principal way in which an independent Scotland, in an interdependent world, would contribute to the collective security of our neighbours and allies.”
She earned further plaudits by denouncing in unequivocal terms the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February and insisting that the conflict strengthened the case for Scotland’s membership of the North Atlantic alliance.
But such stirring rhetoric has now been exposed as no more than that – rhetoric. For when it comes down to it, nationalism of whatever variety shares the one common value: self-interest.
Kate Forbes, Sturgeon’s finance secretary, has reacted badly to a UK Government request that Scotland contributes £65million to a fund for purchasing weapons for Ukraine’s fight for survival. Defence, after all, is a reserved matter, so why should Scotland contribute?
Forbes would agree the payment “on this occasion” but made it clear that “this must not be seen as any kind of precedent”.
Heaven forfend that the devolved Scottish Government should spend money on anything that is reserved to Westminster by the Scotland Act. Aside, that is, from the £20million of UK taxpayers’ money that has reportedly been set aside to fund a referendum on independence – an issue that is most certainly reserved to Westminster.
And if the division between devolved and reserved powers is so sacrosanct to the SNP, perhaps they might explain why they are spending £36 million on international aid – another policy area in which Holyrood has no responsibility.
If Forbes wishes to help Ukraine (does she?) without negatively affecting Scotland’s domestic budget, perhaps she could pay some attention to the saga of the unbuilt ferries, which are costing taxpayers
£150 million more than originally estimated, some of which might be justified if they were ever actually built and delivered.
Or perhaps she might have a word with ministerial colleagues who chose to delay the Scottish census by a year in order to decouple it from the UK exercise – a decision which has resulted in a return rate so low that it risks making the data, in Sturgeon’s own words, “worthless”. The yearlong delay and the repeated extension to the deadline for the return of census forms have incurred extra costs of £21 million.
Perhaps Forbes is claiming – with some justification – that ministerial negligence and incompetence is already costing Scotland so much that any additional pressures on budgets simply can’t be afforded.
Yet this is a party and an administration that claims to support the rights of small countries standing up against belligerent neighbours. It believes in international solidarity, in international alliances and collective solidarity … right up to the point where they are expected to help fund that solidarity.
This unpleasant little dispute shows the SNP, and nationalism in general, in a poor light. But it is also an accurate one. For all the SNP’S talk of inclusivity, progress and “civic nationalism”, its philosophy remains what it has always been: narrow, self-interested and exclusionary.
That this devolved government is grudging towards a nation in peril from Russian aggression says all you need to know about how an Snp-led independent Scotland would operate.